Let me just begin by saying, me and my delicate girly-brain will be watching Game of Thrones (and Camelot, and all the sci-fi/fantasy I want to).

[Image: A screencap of Ginia Bellafante’s wikipedia page; text reads: Ginia Bellafante (born March 31, 1965) is an American writer (of incredibly poorly written articles) and critic, for the New York Times, New York Observer, and Time (magazine).]

Ginia Bellafante’s Wikipedia page is not kind (and rightly so- though yes, Wikipedia pages are supposed to be ‘objective’, etc) and describes her work as “poorly written”. Unfortunately, she is read at the New York Times, which gives her undue credibility. Her most recent offense offering is A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms, a startlingly sexist (critique??) New York Times article on the new show, Game of Thrones, and what she deems is its failure to appeal to women and its success at being “boy fiction”, whatever in fresh hell that means.

Keeping track of the principals alone feels as though it requires the focused memory of someone who can play bridge at a Warren Buffett level of adeptness. In a sense the series, which will span 10 episodes, ought to come with a warning like, “If you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of ‘Sex and the City.’ ”

The show has been elaborately made to the point that producers turned to a professional at something called the Language Creation Society to design a vocabulary for the savage Dothraki nomads who provide some of the more Playboy-TV-style plot points and who are forced to speak in subtitles.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Reinforcing an oppression (in this case racism, “savage Dothraki” wtf?) instead of critiquing it. Check.(What’s interesting here is that she misses the opportunity to critique the show on its racist othering of characters of color in the Dothraki. Instead she uses “savage” to describe them and seems to be more annoyed at the mere existence of subtitles (because y’know, subtitles were created just to inconvenience privileged.)

It doesn’t forget the classic, the romance was put there for the delicate flowers that are our women. Check.

So, you ever wonder why there aren’t more Sarah Connors on your TV/movie theater? Because mess like this still gets published in major media.

I don’t have HBO, so I can’t watch the series, but I have read all the books (and I love them!). Having read them, and thus having a suspicion which sex scenes she may be talking about (Daenerys and Drogo, f’r instance), I can tell her that they are probably not the element in this series that’s going to draw women! (Many of the sex scenes are actually rape scenes, which are never fun to watch. If you watch something with them, you’re probably watching in spite of them, not because of them).

But yes, the “if you can’t count cards” comment was especially obnoxious.

Oh yes, I just watched last night’s first episode. None of the sexual scenes involving women would draw me to a show. I was definitely watching in spite of them, raging inside at the cavalier violence.

There’s this horrible idea in media that women need clear cut story lines, no development needed. It’s what apparently ‘puts us off sci-fi’. Fallacy all of it, sexist fallacy.